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Radical Middle | 109<br />
mumbled resentment about black ingratitude. I came across<br />
Punt sitting alone on a step in his hang-loose fashion and asked<br />
what he thought. Punt said, “God was in the best of moods<br />
when He made that man”. I thought God hadn’t been feeling<br />
too bad when He made Punt either. I’d been a junior reporter<br />
when he was Deputy Minister of education and he’d been<br />
the most accessible guy in the phone book, answering every<br />
question without hesitation and usually throwing in a few<br />
extras as well. Nowadays you go through a secretary’s secretary<br />
and three weeks later you get a prepared statement saying<br />
nothing in careful disguise.<br />
It seemed odd to find a politician whom everyone liked, and<br />
since it was only tomorrow that I was re-propagandising enos<br />
I resumed the journalist’s role and sleuthed. I went to the bars<br />
of Nelspruit and the shebeens of Kanyamazane and picked up<br />
hitch-hikers and called at the conservative Party and at azapo<br />
and asked how Kangwane was coming on and how Mr Mabuza<br />
was shaping up. The cP man said he’d have no problem being<br />
ruled by Mabuza; but the Mabuzas would be pushed out by the<br />
communists. The azapo office said they had no problem with<br />
Mabuza; but couldn’t collaborate with apartheid. around the<br />
townships, yep, a problem there was. Kangwane is meant to be<br />
the Swazi homeland, but lots of people thought Mabuza was<br />
Shangaan. To some, this mattered. To some it didn’t. To some,<br />
he wasn’t Shangaan anyway.<br />
for neither the first time nor the last I wondered how much<br />
of the ethnic hang-up the homeland policy had created and<br />
how much was there to start with. But once I had worried that<br />
the ethnic mix held heavy downsides. Now I worried no more.<br />
I was attuned to viewing every conflict not as it was but as it<br />
might be. as it was, politics consisted of activists carooming<br />
about like the atoms of a sulphur reaction, claiming unprovable<br />
support, press-ganging the doubtful and operating on a skewed<br />
foundation. as it could be, politics would consist of practical<br />
relationships between elected leaders, persuading and inveigling<br />
semi-interested voters to the polls, settling their disputes by
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